Socrates or Muhammad? [Pope Benedict XVI] Joseph Ratzinger on the destiny of reason.

WeeklyStandard.com ^ | 10/02/2006, Volume 012, Issue 03 | Lee Harris

[baseball_fan]

…Contrary to what the New York Times reported, Ratzinger is not providing merely "a note on jihad" that has no real bearing on the central message of his address. According to his own words, the topic of jihad constitutes "the starting-point" for his reflection on faith and reason. Ratzinger uses the Islamic concept of jihad to elucidate his critique of modern reason from within.

Modern reason argues that questions of ethics, of religion, and of God are outside its compass. Because there is no scientific method by which such questions can be answered, modern reason cannot concern itself with them, nor should it try to. From the point of view of modern reason, all religious faiths are equally irrational, all systems of ethics equally unverifiable, all concepts of God equally beyond rational criticism. But if this is the case, then what can modern reason say when it is confronted by a God who commands that his followers should use violence and even the threat of death in order to convert unbelievers?

If modern reason cannot concern itself with the question of God, then it cannot argue that a God who commands jihad is better or worse than a God who commands us not to use violence to impose our religious views on others. To the modern atheist, both Gods are equally figments of the imagination, in which case it would be ludicrous to discuss their relative merits. The proponent of modern reason, therefore, could not possibly think of participating in a dialogue on whether Christianity or Islam is the more reasonable religion, since, for him, the very notion of a "reasonable religion" is a contradiction in terms.

Ratzinger wishes to challenge this notion…

[Cicero]

Modern reason is materialist. It throws up its hands in the face of the metaphysical or spiritual. I wasn't knocking the importance of Socrates, whom the Pope did indeed emphasize in his talk. But one of the keys is Aristotle's concept of universals.

It's impossible to think except in universals, but modern materialists tend to think in terms of individual objects. Yes, science still speaks of species and genuses, but even there finds some difficulties in defining these terms. Whether two animals can have viable progeny tends to be the definition of species. Aristotle, on the other hand, was extending the concept of the Platonic Idea or Ideal in a new direction.

Benedict didn't really need to talk much about Aristotle, because he is already worked into the Scholastic tradition.